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The rolling green hills and neatly trimmed hedgerows of a classic English countryside hide a deeper story, as the film Wilding reveals. It shows how one couple worked to restore an ailing country estate to its natural splendor. When Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree inherited Knepp Farm in West Sussex, the heavy clay soil had grown depleted from years of intensive farming. Chemistry-reliant crops left the land lifeless.

Seeking a new path, they discovered the pioneering theories of Dutch ecologist Frans Vera. His idea—let nature heal itself through wild grazing animals—offered promise. Out went cattle and machinery; in came native breeds like Exmoor ponies and Tamworth pigs to roam freely as their instincts led. Though neighbors scorned the unkempt fields, the couple persevered.

Beautiful cinematography captures their estate’s transformation over two decades. Abandoned crops gave way to wildflowers teeming with insects and birds. Endangered species like storks and nightingales returned.

Nature documentary Wilding has signed distribution deals for key territories, with the film crossing the £500,000 mark in the UK-Ireland as the highest-grossing documentary of 2024.

MetFilm Sales has sold the film to France (Jupiter), Italy (Wanted), Germany, Austria, Switzerland (Polyband), Spain (Festival Films), Australia-New Zealand (Madman) and Scandinavia-Baltics (Nonstop Entertainment). All territories are planning theatrical releases from Q4 2024 onwards, while negotiations continue in other key territories.

Wilding crossed £500,000 at the UK-Ireland box office yesterday, having been released on June 14 by MetFilm Distribution. It will continue to play theatrically in the territory across the summer.

Directed by David Allen and produced by Gaby Bastyra,...

RankFilm (distributor)Three-day gross (June 14-16)Total gross to dateWeek 1. Inside Out 2 (Disney) £11.3m £11.3m 1 2. Bad Boys: Ride Or Die (Sony) £1.9m £7.1m 2 3. If (Paramount) £414,673 £11.4m 5 4. Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes (Disney) £389,000 £15m 6 5. The Garfield Movie (Sony) £354,829 £7.9m 4

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.27.

Disney’s Inside Out 2 stirred up plenty of emotions at the UK and Ireland box office this weekend after its £11.3m debut made it the biggest opening of the year so far and the third-highest of all time for an animated feature.

The Pixar sequel opened in 684 sites, for an impressive £16,520 location average.

The farmer and author on allowing nature to transform and restore our ecology – and how the best way to measure progress is through dung beetles

At lunch in Hove, a block back from the seafront, on the first summery day of the year, Isabella Tree is explaining the phrase that best describes her work: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

The phrase captures the philosophy behind rewilding, the movement that the happily named Tree has done so much to pioneer, with her husband, Charlie Burrell, on the 1,400 acres of land they own at Knepp in Sussex. The essence of their project has been to undo the damage of decades of intensive farming by working with the environment, rather than against it.

David Allen’s Wilding documentary is a fairytale of biodiversity which charts an ambitious 3,500-acre rewilding project at Knepp Castle and Estate in Surrey. Packed with enchanting wildlife footage, irritating recreations and engaging narration, this is a flawed but winning story of gumption, privilege, hope and woo.

Sir Charles Burrell (Charlie) and Lady Burrell – Isabella Tree, author of Wilding, the best-selling book and source material for this film – moved to the 400-year-old arable and livestock farming estate Knepp when Charlie inherited its custodianship. Despite the idyllic first impression of the surrounding countryside, manmade interventions and a century under the plough had devastated the land and native wildlife. Under the guidance of eccentric academic and arboriculturist Ted Green, the couple learned to see things differently, to understand the dynamic ecosystem dancing from the ground beneath their feet to the oak trees soaring over their heads and to honour it.

After a...

Mapping the regeneration of over-farmed and polluted land given over to the wild in 2000, this is a welcome story about nature’s ability to just get on with it

You’ll never look at a green and pleasant pasture in the same way again after watching this documentary about the rewilding project at the Knepp estate in West Sussex. The land belongs to Sir Charles Burrell, 10th baronet (he goes by plain old Charlie), who was in his 20s when he inherited the five-and-a-half square mile estate. The plan was to follow in the family tradition of farming, but the heavy clay soil at Knepp didn’t suit modern intensive methods so, in 2000, £1.5m in debt, Burrell and his conservationist wife, Isabella Tree, sold the cows and let everything go to seed.

Looking at Knepp’s unruly landscape today, all thorny scrubland, brambles and little mounds dug by who knows which critter,...

Knepp estate was £1.5m in debt. Now it thrums with wildlife, visitors flock there – and farmers are stampeding to copy its success. We meet the star of a captivating film about this amazing rebirth

Take a stroll through the classic English countryside of West Sussex, and you’ll notice things becoming strange just beyond the village of Dial Post. Here, a patchwork of tidy fields bordered by neat hedgerows becomes a bamboozling maze of flowery glades and thickets of hawthorn, blackthorn and sallow. Rabbits dart between billowing brambles, watched by a fallow deer sporting furry new antlers. Stranger than the unexpectedly abundant plants and mammals is the cacophony of birdsong – the common melodies of thrushes, robins and blackcaps but also songs virtually extinguished across Britain: cuckoos, nightingales and turtle doves. Oddest of all is a clacking noise that sounds like two hollow sticks being banged together.

“Isn’t it a great sound?...

"The whole landscape was breathing a sigh of relief. You could hear it." MetFilm has revealed the official UK trailer for a documentary film tiled Wilding, an adaptation of the book of the same name from Isabella Tree. The film is a compelling look at a dying landscape that is healed against all odds, going on to thrive in astonishing ways. The book describes the creation of Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England. The 3,500 acres wildland project was created in the grounds of Knepp Castle, where they torn down all the fences and let nature take over again. This almost seems like the British doc version of The Biggest Little Farm doc about a couple creating a sustainable farm in California. Wilding directed by five-time Emmy Award-winner David Allen, with cinematography by multi-bafta & Emmy Award-winning DPs Tim Cragg and Simon de Glanville. And featuring a score...

Met Film Sales has acquired international rights to David Allen’s nature documentary Wilding, which it will introduce to buyers at next week’s European Film Market.

Met Film Distribution, the company’s distribution arm, will release the film theatrically in the UK this summer. Submarine negotiated the deal with MetFilm on behalf of the filmmakers, and will handle the North American sale.

Wilding is based on Isabella Tree’s 2018 book Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm, in which Tree details the efforts of herself and her husband to renew the ecosystem on their estate, Knepp, after decades of intensive agriculture.

Taking the fashionable genre as a starting point, Ric Rawlings’ film tries to elevate amateurism in three creepy rural stories but it just looks inept

Those interested in the concept of rewilding, a form of environmental conservation that seeks to restore land to a more natural state as popularised by the book by Isabella Tree, should be well advised that this film has nothing to do with that. Rather, it is an almost endearingly amateurish package, written and directed by Ric Rawlins, that is an exercise in something that’s almost as fashionable these days: folk horror. There’s lashings of folk horror about these days, some of it, like Enys Men, very good. Rewilding, however, is not very good, if we are being honest. But it’s as folky as you get, telling three disconnected stories set in the West Country and Wales revolving around such folky elements as spooky coastal caves,...